Woodwell Climate | Our Climate Future: Fact + Fiction

Foreign.

Welcome everyone, to our webinar today. Thank you for joining us. I'm Heather Goldstone. I'm chief Communications Officer at Woodwell Climate Research center and thrilled to be moderating today's webinar. Just want to say a few brief introductory things before we launch into our panel discussion, and we will have an opportunity for your questions as well later in the webinar. So please use the Q and A function for those. That's the little question mark, thought bubble, button down at the bottom of your screen so that we can get your questions and bring those to the conversation as well. Woodwell Climate Research center, as you may know, is a nonprofit organization conducting science for solutions at the nexus of climate, people and nature. Those are solutions urgently needed as we face an escalating climate crisis that has been in the headlines almost weekly over the past several months, with really devastating impacts around the globe, from California to a few months ago, North Carolina and Europe, and the list goes on and on. And as we meet this moment of intensity in these climate impacts, you know, it can, it can be a lot. And headlines sometimes can feel a little surreal at the same time. I don't know about you, but certainly for me, I have found that in the past few years, fiction sometimes doesn't feel so escapist. It feels a little too real. And so the topic that we're going to take on today is really at the intersection of science and imagination. Now, I should say imagination is of course a big part of science, but kind of at that intersection to really think about how both facts, the results of scientific investigation and fiction, speculative and imaginative practices can help us really envision where we're headed and also motivate the action that's really needed right now. Right. We are in a moment where many people are struggling with exhaustion and overwhelm from all of the news and everything going on in the world. So we're going to tackle why do we need that kind of vision? What does it look like to create it? And how do these important practices of speculation, imagination and scientific inquiry all come together to help us build that vision and motivate action? Before I introduce our panelists and we dive into today's conversation, I do want to recognize that Woodwell Climate Research center, where, where I'm currently sitting in what is now known as Falmouth, Massachusetts, is located on the sacred and traditional lands of the Wampanoag people who are very much still a part of and a vibrant and influential part of our community here on Cape Cod. And we are grateful for that and recognize the importance of indigenous leadership and sovereignty around the world. Now, joining me for our exciting conversation today, we've got Christopher Schwalm, who is the director of the Risk Program here at Woodwell Climate Research Center. He leads incredibly exciting work with partners ranging from world class asset Manager, Wellington Management, to under resourced communities around the United States and around the globe, helping these very diverse partners understand the climate risks that they face and help advance conversations from simply understanding risk to actually starting to think about and plan for increased resilience moving forward. So incredibly important work. I will also note that Christopher has dabbled in fiction writing, and it is thanks to conversations with Christopher that I and my team first started thinking about the role that fiction writing and speculative fiction might have in communicating about our work. So Christopher, hat tip there. Thanks for that. And we'll hear more about that in a minute. Vandana Singh, who also really straddles these two worlds, professor of Physics and Environment in the Department of Environment, Society and Sustainability at Framingham State University, very close to us here in Massachusetts. She's a transdisciplinary scholar of climate change with a focus on pedagogy at the intersection of science, society and justice. I'm loving that we've got the nexus in the Woodwell mission. We've got the intersection in your work. Vandana is also a science fiction and fantasy author and a 2021 Climate Imagination Fellow at the center for Science and the Imagination. Which brings me last but not least to Joey Esterich, who is at the ASU center for Science and the Imagination was a leadership role in that Climate Imagination Fellowship that Vandana did and has led other programs there. He is the assistant director also of Future Tense, a partnership between ASU and New America that explores emerging technolog, culture, policy and society. So some really big issues there all coming together. And Joey, kind of one of the people who's orchestrating the work at this important intersection of science and imagination. So welcome to all of you. It's really, really great to have you here today.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much for having us.

Thank you.

So I want to start with just a little bit of backstory from each of you on how you found this really exciting Intersect or Nexus. And Christopher, I mentioned yours, that you came to the communications team, I think that was a couple of years ago, and said, hey, with one of our partners, we've been dabbling in writing these speculative fiction pieces. What do you think? Is this something communications might be interested in? So how did that first come up for you?

Well, the genesis of the idea is really part and parcel to how we work with the financial services industry. That is a lot of what comes out of the climate science community. The communication practices are very difficult, I think, for the broader may public to understand. And so the notion behind fictionalization, to use that term, is we wanted to create a different narrative that would be much more resonant with, in our case, the kind of the, you know, median investment manager. And in order to do that, we moved away from kind of the fact that base narrative, right, in terms of it'll become this much warmer by this point in time, which will have these types of climate impacts. We want to move away from that and tell the story, tell a story that we thought would simply reach a much wider, wider audience, which really pushed us down this path. And I think to date we've done about one or two of these every year or so. We focused on day zero, we focused.

On.

Sorry, I should explain that a little bit. The idea behind day zero was when a particular municipality will, quote, unquote, run out of water. And so we focused on a narrative like that centered on Phoenix, Arizona. We focused on another type, again fictionalization of what might happen in an ice free Arctic. Just to give you a couple of examples. The fundamental push here was to bring this to life in a way that's simply a laundry list of numbers about drought, about wildfire, as impressive as that might be, again, to bring it to life in a different way that people could simply relate to. That was the fundamental push.

So Vandana, I would love to hear your version of that evolution because you are also trained as a scientist, a professor of physics, teaching students physics as well as doing research, research, and you are a multi times published and award winning author in the science fiction realm. And now starting to bring it full circle, to start to bring story and imaginative practices back into the classroom and into the science practice. Where did that journey start for you?

Well, for me it started really long time ago, you know, because even before I thought of a career in the sciences as a kid, and especially as a shy kid, I was really fascinated by the non human, which means not just other species, but matter itself. And it seemed to me, and shy kids tend to pay attention to things. So it seemed to me that nature was having this conversation and I was getting to eavesdrop a little bit on that. And it seemed to me that narrative was kind of in a sense happening all the time. And one can think about science as a way for the non human or at least as a way for the human to eavesdrop on the conversations and the stories of the non human surround whether that's other species or matter and energy that animate our universe. So it was kind of like the two threads, kind of. I started out with both threads being mixed up. And so it was almost inevitable that when I chose a career in the sciences, in physics in particular, particle physics used to be my field, it was partly because of the. Of the. This feeling that narrative is part of, you know, is a. Is part of the tapestry of the universe and that nature also tells stories. And so the two things for me are part of a spectrum. And so I've never seen them as separate. And so since those, those childhood experiences and, you know, fast forward to early 2000s, when I started to write fiction for the world and not just for myself and my siblings, that's kind of how it happened with me.

Vandana, you are apparently blowing people's minds. Inspiring love and applause here from our audience as you're saying that. So that is. That's terrific. And I love the idea that nature is telling stories. I will say that our own CEO, Max Holmes @ the center is. Has been known to say that every river has a story. We just have to listen. So I think you've probably got folks who, who think and feel similarly at Woodwell and Joey, you have really made a career of working at this intersection, which until a couple of years ago, I didn't really even realize existed, and as I said, orchestrating it and really building the work at this intersection. So how did you find that.

Niche? Yeah, thanks. Career is a big word. I do feel like it was mostly luck. Right place, right time, but I can kind of trace some paths, I guess. I. My background academically is in film and media studies and as well as gender studies, feminist studies, where I was a researcher, looked at cultural representations and cultural narratives and that they create beliefs or can change beliefs, particularly around issues of justice and social identity. I actually left my PhD program at ASU to take this job at this new research center, the center for Science and the Imagination. I was the first staff member hired, and we spent a few years kind of casting around, trying to figure out what we were, who we were for. We had the goal of trying to get people to think more creatively and ambitiously about the future, about a range of possible futures, but actually figuring out, instantiating that into practice, I guess, was a. Was a journey. So, you know, several early projects were books where we brought science fiction authors and artists together with experts from a variety of subjects and fields to create what we were calling at the time technically grounded visions of the future. Things that were actionable and, and were resonating with cutting edge understanding in a variety of fields, that could be education, that could be mechanical engineering, that could be physics. And it just emerged that climate seemed like a particularly urgent area for this kind of work. That it, you know, it, it uniquely kind of requires thinking across the local and the global and scales in between. It crosses scientific understanding with public policy, with culture and belief and issues of identity, as well as crucially, issues of justice and inequality. And as Christopher said, it's an area where models and data are really persuasive and informative, but they can be overwhelming and hard to parse for non specialists. And so we first did a series of climate fiction contests that were global in scope. We had contributors from over 75 countries and published three volumes of climate fiction under the title Everything Change. And we did that in collaboration with the Creative Writing center at Arizona State University as well as our Global Institute of Sustainability. And that was really like an effort to just say, like there, you know, there aren't as many venues as there ought to be for publishing this kind of work. And so we got a deluge of really high quality climate writing from those. And that led on to something we'll probably touch on later, but the Climate Action Almanac, which is a recent collaboration with the Climate Works foundation, where we brought Vandana and a bunch of other really talented thinkers and writers from across the globe to tell stories about hopeful climate futures in whatever sense that meant to our contributors. But yeah, this just has emerged as a particularly fertile intersection, I think, and one that feels, of course, quite urgent and where we have an opportunity to tell all kinds of interesting stories about particular people in particular places, but then have the consequences kind of roll up to and be in dialogue with these global.

Realities. So I'd love to dive in with each of you a little bit more to the relationship that you see between science and science fiction, or perhaps fact and fiction, science based investigation and projection, and where that starts to become speculative fiction. And I will just say, everyone currently watching, I know, I said, we'll take questions later. I'm going to change that because George put a question in, totally preempted me and said, what do you think is the relationship between what you're calling climate fiction and scenario planning? So clearly everybody on here is on the same wavelength. You guys have great questions, so go ahead and jump in, put them in the Q and A, and we'll just weave them into the conversation. But we can mix up the order here in terms of who answers, who wants to jump in first. What's that relationship between science and science fiction? Is it a sequential? You go from one to the other? Are they parallel tracks? Do they interact in some other way? How do you think about that.

Relationship? I'm happy to kick us off if that's okay. So to me, it's very, very much iterative and I'm not necessarily sure what even comes first. I have found over my 20 year career working in what I'll loosely call the climate space, that I get a lot of inspiration from science fiction. It simply helps you move away from a prior mindset you might have had when you come at it just from a list of facts and you're really trying to understand the story, you want to understand the characters, which of course are not just the cold, hard facts about it getting warmer, but about the communities that are impacted, about lives and livelihoods that are completely upended. And so coming at this from a narrative perspective, from this idea of you're telling a story and you want the story to somehow galvanize action in a way that the endpoint of that story is one that leaves no one behind, to me this is very much a self reinforcing loop. And I think a lot of the storytelling, a lot of the speculative fiction work that we have done is actually very akin to scenario planning. What I mean by that is when we do this type of speculative fiction idea, it's not as if I can give you a very well calibrated probability about these things happening in a particular geography or in a particular year. But it's very easy to see these threads coming together. That is, it's very easy to see it as a probable future, even though I can't tell you what the precise likelihood of that future is. Meaning that it's something that we ought to think about, it's something that we ought to try to figure out who we are as, as a society, to be able to deal with the.

Implications. Yeah, and I can jump in too. And I just want to say what a pleasure it is to meet physical scientists who are not only open to fiction and the imagination, but embrace it. Because I don't think it's common enough among physical scientists, you know, so I'm more used to being looked at as though I have three heads when I start talking about science and fiction and science fiction. So, yeah, so grateful to be in this company. I guess the way I see it is, yeah, I Do see the two things as integrated. You know, nature gives us constraints, and that's important to acknowledge. And you know, science is a framework that emerges with those constraints that we get from matter and from the universe. And what the imagination allows us to do is to play in that space. And occasionally, if you're being really, really out there in this speculative realm, to imagine what it was like if you didn't have those constraints. But what we are talking about here, specific to climate change, where we want to acknowledge the constraints of physical law and then we want to kind of play in that creative space. So what I feel speculative fiction does very well is to immerse us in possibilities that are different from our current world and our current existence. And so I like to use the word paradigm somewhat in the broader sense than Thomas Kuhn meant it when he wrote his famous book, in the sense of a socio scientific construct or conceptual structure through which we make sense of the world. Right. And it, it informs, you know, what we feel is a good life. It informs, you know, the default reality around us that we don't question because it's the air we breathe. So what science fiction does really well, what speculative fiction does really well, I think when it's done well, is to immerse ourselves in alternatives so we can start recognizing that the way we live is a, is a construct, that the concepts we assume about society are constructs that can be deconstructed and changed and that other possibilities exist. It helps us to break the paradigm by immersing us as viscerally as you can be without being bodily in those places and situations in alternative futures. And sometimes it does that through dystopia, which has its lessons too. But often if you have nothing but dystopia, it just gets you down, you know, so it's. So we need some, some warnings, but we also need to use our intelligence and creativity to acknowledge grim reality and to find the pathways through that reality to better possibilities and better futures. And so I think that that to me is the greatest role that science fiction and speculative fiction in general can.

Play. I'll just add to what my esteemed colleagues have said because I thoroughly agree with all of it. I'll just start with George's question about scenario planning and climate fiction. And for me, one of the major differences is just the intention of the text and kind of the relationship of the text to the audience. So a scenario is traditionally meant to act as a form of decision support. So it's meant to be a sort of channel of communication. Often Communicating complex and entangled information and allowing groups of people to have a hopefully more robust and productive conversation and reach a decision of some sort, whether it's at the level of an individual or a firm or a neighborhood organization or a society as a whole. Whereas, you know, the. The fictional stories have a broader ambit, perhaps they, you might say they're trying to evoke affect, they're trying to get you to identify with people and places and. And imagine yourself immersed, to use bandinus word in those places, and also inviting interpretation. The literary theorist Umberto Eco talked about the open text. The idea that many texts are inviting us to. To come in and deliberate about causality, about agency, about how the parts of the text fit together, why particular elements are in or out of a story, why characters act the way they do, or even reading against the text and saying, like, I don't agree with the premises of this text. I don't agree with the values that are inherent in this kind of story. And so that, you know, it's. Literature can be a good bit more quicksilver, I think, than scenarios are intended to be because they're. They're often written for a particular operational purpose. So really, I think it's more about. It's a poetic thing. It's more about how you execute on a premise. But I think they do share quite a lot in terms of speculating and building visions of the future the way that Christopher and Vandana described. I really like Vandana's point about multiple futures and about the multiple paradigms. I always think of stories as helping us understand causality, not seeing the future as an inevitable, you know, pronouncement of doom or plentitude. It's not a hallway that we're being thrown down. It's, you know, the future is going to be the outcome of choices that are made collectively and to a lesser extent, individually perhaps. And so exploring that space of causality can be a really powerful thing that stories can do. And lastly, just a word I like when I think about what fiction does best and it's sensitized, that it sensitizes people. I think often with climate fiction, people hope that it'll function as an effective form of propaganda, that it'll wake people up or that it'll make them feel the urgency of environmental calamity in some way. But I think what it does best is sensitize us to particular factors, particular relationships, particular opportunities or challenges. So, you know, it might sensitize us to a particular element of a local culture that might lead to or support climate action. Or it might sensitize us to, say, the connection between energy systems and water systems, if the story's technologically engaged in that way. So, you know, helping us make connections that might be in the literature, but not terribly evident and concretely felt, you know, so it's like trying to figure out how much we ought to expect from fiction stories and not asking them to trend, transform minds, but instead asking, like, well, how can they help us kind of muddle our way through problems and again, have better conversations with one.

Another? I really like that. And I might pick up on that thread and go back to Vandana and some of the things you were saying about agency and picking up on these threads from Joey, of kind of providing vision, sensitizing people to things in a broad way through fiction. How does that. That function of kind of providing vision, which feels like, in my mind, something that's kind of a longer term or a slower process when we're in what feels like a really urgent crisis mode. And I know we on a daily basis are confronted with people that say, you know, just tell me what I need to do. What is the thing that I need to do right now to feel like I'm making change in this situation? And I know you've given some thought to this. This tension around urgency and how we frame it and how story kind of fits into the picture there. So I wonder if you could share some of your thinking.

There. Yeah, I'd be glad to. I think that that's a really important question, and I'm going to invoke the. And, well, let me preface what I'm about to say by, you know, mentioning how much. How grateful I am to indigenous ways of knowing, from which I've learned a lot and continue to learn. I'm speaking from the lands of the Nipmuc people, and indigenous ways of knowing have really helped me to understand this notion of urgency versus the long view and to see them not as separate things, but to see them as entangled. If you look at time, well, time is a pretty slippery thing for theoretical physicists because it depends on gravity and speed. But that aside, we know that in the sciences and in general in modern societies, we tend to think of time as being generally linear, from the past to the present to the future. In fact, that's important because that's how we know, for instance, that current climate change is abnormal, because we can contextualize it with past climate, including deep past. We also can project forward into the future, whether use probabilistic approaches or use the upcoming storyline approaches or whatever. The trouble with that is that there are other ways that are more fruitful about thinking about time. So not throwing away the linear time notion in our urgent present, but to complicate that with other ways of thinking. So I'm going to refer to, for instance, somebody who's been a really major influence on my thinking is a Potawatomi scholar, Kyle White. There are two amazing essays of his. One is called Time as Kinship and the other is called Against Crisis Epistemology. So I'm going to try to. Well, I probably can't do justice to his body of work in a few minutes, but I'm going to try to summariz. Essentially what he's saying is this, that if you have this notion that we have to do this because the crisis, it actually encourages a kind of colonial suppression of people who've already been suppressed and who've already been oppressed by the forces of history, in the sense that you can say, okay, we really need to turn this reservation into a wind power wind farm. So too bad that you don't like it. We have to do it because we are in a cris. Well, you know, indigenous people, colonized people have heard that before, okay? And we know we can't. We shouldn't be going in that direction. So the notion of complexifying time a little bit in the sense that we reorient our paradigms and we start to think no less urgently, but more usefully. And I'm going to bring in a thread from also what we know, how our brains work when we are frightened or afraid of something. Well, you know, it's important to be afraid about what's coming, okay? But it's also important not to be trapped by fear, because what does that do? That kind of disconnects our prefrontal cortex right from the rest of the brain. And you can't think straight, you can't be creative. Try being creative when you're deadly afraid of something doesn't work. And we need all the creativity and intelligence that we can get. And so the way he reorients it is to get us to think about kinship and to think about climate change as a story of broken and changing relationships among and between humans and the rest of nature. And that reorientation, it's not as though to think about that means that, oh, we're going to spend a lot of time thinking about that when we need to do urgent action. No, you can reorient yourself. You can get together with community and you can say, okay, based on these ideas, what do we do? Okay. And so, you know, in my, in my transdisciplinary scholarship work, I've. I've come up with a framework for evaluating climate solutions. It's an ongoing work. I'm learning from all of these wonderful, rich traditions and so that we can think critically and ethically and creatively about what we need to do and think together. Because collective intelligence is also a thing. So. Yeah, so that's, that's kind of where I'm coming from on.

That. Christopher, I'm seeing a lot of nodding from, from your corner of the screen. Is there anything you'd like to, to jump in with and amplify.

There? Yeah. So one of the things that I'm struck by in the current discourse about where we are in our warming trajectory is the extent to which science is, quote, unquote, right or wrong. And that's a very, I mean, that statement in and of itself probably merit its own detailed panel. I guess I wanted to link back to something about our, or rather humanity's collective climate climate journey in the sense that we think about how we understand the future. Right. Our time travel device to understand the future is of course, a climate simulation framework, an Earth system model. A climate model, call it whatever you like. And of course, the fundamental reason we do that, we want to, in effect, divine the future is that so we can make much more enlightened choices today. And I just wanted to briefly touch on a debate going on because I feel that it's relevant around the whole storytelling thing, which is how good are climate models, how trustworthy they are they. And again, this is not going to be a discourse into theoretical physics or differential equations. It's something that's much more, quote, unquote meta. I simply would like to flag that one issue we have to confront as scientists in telling stories is how climate science perceives itself. I'll just give you one example of this that I will hope ties all these threads together. We are now in 2025, we've seen in 2024 and in 2023 that we have breached the 1.5 warming limit two years in a row. If you look at the most recent report from the ipcc, look at the summary of policymakers where they detail warming levels. There's a very simple, simple graph, again in summary, for policymakers, which characterizes the warming level today. It is at least 1 1/2 degrees. So 1 of the things that we need to tell stories about is simultaneously a message of hope, a message of agency, of how we can deal with what will certainly be a warming planet, but also the fact that at this point we have gone through something which, for want of a better way to describe this, I would characterize as climate failure. That is, we simply need to own up to where we are, to have a lot more agency and empowerment, to really reimagine the future that we want to be. And this is a very interesting time, I think, at the intersection as well as at the utility, to use that term, of this kind of narrative style. Right. Stories hold us together. What stories do we tell on the one hand, and on the other hand, the extent to which climate science can directly bear on those.

Stories. Thank you for that. I want to turn our attention to, I think, a. Another really important hallmark of our moment that very much intersects with the climate space but is not unique to, and that is the prevalence of misinformation, of disinformation, erosion of trust. We have a very confused and confusing, I would say, information landscape at this point. And I would be curious to hear from each of you, given that, whether you worry that climate fiction might further muddy the waters. And Joey, maybe I'll save your comments for last because I know in the projects that you guide and steward, you give a lot of thought to how to avoid that with speculative work and art in the climate space. But Vandana or Christopher, would either of you like to jump in with thoughts on whether climate fiction risks causing more confusion, I guess, than it.

Resolves? Well, I guess I can jump in if that's all right. Okay. Yeah. We live in such an unfortunate time when there is so much misinformation and disinformation everywhere. And that actually makes me think about the fact that one of the unacknowledged things in the climate discourse is the presence of power. We have to ask ourselves why. This is, I think, the 30th year in which the United nations is meeting. We are having the COP talks in Brazil this year. Well, how is it that we've been meeting for 30 years and nothing substantive has happened? I mean, maybe important steps have been taken, but nothing substantive has happened. Who's in the way? Who benefits from the current power structure and how are they co opting the discourse and also the sociopolitical landscape? And are we experiencing that right now in the United States and around the world as well? So, you know, we have to acknowledge the prevalence of power and to acknowledge that there are people who, and their structures and systems that want to not only continue to exist, but continue to kind of have kind of hegemony over the planet essentially, and are holding the planet to ransom and are preventing meaningful action from being taken at sufficient scale and depth. So that's part of it, because the misinformation, disinformation machine stems from these power structures. We know from investigative reporting that fossil fuel companies, for instance, have been involved in this sort of thing. And we also have right wing authoritarian governments and corporates around the world indulging in this sort of thing. So we have to acknowledge that we are up against something. If we don't recognize that is not going to be enough to simply say, okay, we have all these plans, we have all these solutions, we have all this creativity. So that's where I want to begin. But I also want to state that there is a lot of confusion, this is because of our siloed education system, about the role of fiction. And I've noticed this particularly anecdotally with physical scientists, that one person actually said to me that, oh, if there's such a thing as climate fiction, then people will think that, that climate change is actually fiction. Well, no, that's not what it's about. But unfortunately things can be interpreted that way. And in fact, there's a very interesting little book called Story Listening, which is about the power of narrative and the importance of narrative and stories cut both ways. We have to remember that, and hence the hold that these disinformation engines have over large groups of people. There's stories that are explicit, but they're also implicit stories in society. And often their role is to shore up power structures. So for instance, the stories that are told implicitly about the rich in America, that if you're rich, you've done something good and you must be smarter or better than other people, that sort of thing. And advertisers certainly know all about the power of narrative. So it is a double edged sword. And I think that the way I'll end with this, that as a fiction writer deal with this, is to be more transparent about my writing and to try to explain in essays which I try to write. Alongside that fiction is this paradoxical and beautiful thing that human beings have been doing since the dawn of time, where we invent an elaborate kind of construction of, in a sense, untruths, okay? To tell a deep truth about ourselves and the world, okay? And that's the paradoxical thing about it, because it's all made up. But it's, you know, the best fiction is using the imagination, using things that are factually not the case, because those people and situations don't exist to actually tell a deep truth and to discern that that's not the same as telling lies or telling half truths, which are even more dangerous. So I think one model that I like very much, in fact, is what Chewie and people at the center for the Science and Imagination have often done in their anthologies is to interleave fiction with essays by scholars so you can more easily discern what's an extrapolation through the imagination and then what is like ground reality as we know it. So I'll stop.

There. Joey, do you want to jump in and take that cue and talk a little bit more about how you navigate.

This? Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Vandana, for saying that. Vandana's writing is. We've been very lucky to be able to work with her many times going back to when we first started the Center. So I always say this when we're in an event together. She's my favorite science fiction writer and I work with a lot of science fiction writers, so I probably shouldn't say that, but it is true. But. So we're very lucky to have people who do this so skillfully and with such nimbleness of mind because that's, you know, the quality of execution is important here with all the things we're asking people to keep in mind. But yeah, I mean, a lot of our collections we've done things on space exploration, clean energy transitions, climate AI, bioethics, kind of focused, and others besides. But we often do use this structure of bringing together fictional and non fictional pieces often emerging from collaborative work. So often we're putting fiction writers in teams with people from different disciplines. You might have a sort of, for example, an electrical engineer and a sociologist working with a science fiction writer and a visual artist on a story about solar energy, for example. And. And we not only pair the fiction with short response essays by the people with expertise in the field, kind of talking about the implications of the decisions made in the story and talking about the story as a particular design for a possible future. But we also document the process. So the books have often overlong editors introductions and we often have a section called How We Made this or about the Book that just very descriptively lays out the process. Starting with a series of workshops or convenings. We talk about particular questions that we ask people to consider and always emphasizing in these books that were laying out not predictions or recommendations, but a bunch of possible visions for the future that are grounded in various bodies of knowledge and that extrapolate and take creative license in various ways, but kind of Letting the nonfiction help to contextualize the expressive choices that the author's making, and then using things like discussion questions and accompanying curricular materials or materials for reading groups to help people do the essential social process of talking through the stories together. I mean, as I said before, fiction's a bit quicksilver. Read Stanley Fish in school. He wrote this book called There Is no Textbook in this class where he makes the point that reading, the meaning of a reading emerges an interpretation, and it emerges out of interpretive communities and groups of people making sense of texts and making use of stories strategically in accordance with their values or with the knowledge they have or to achieve certain ends. So, exactly the power picture that Vandana was talking about. Yeah, I think also, I mean, to me, Vandana's point about power really resonates, and I think hopefully what fiction stories can help us do in some cases is when it seems like there's a kind of monolithic, overwhelming, you know, intimidatingly complex system that's clearly unequal, that fiction can help help us visualize constraints on action as well as illuminating opportunities for building coalitions, for achieving solidarities, for taking particular strategic actions. And, you know, particularly with climate, like another. And getting Heather to the fiction, in fact, question, like a lot of what we do, and I think what we have, you know, an opportunity, but also kind of duty to do with climate stories is to root them in the specific and the local. So much of global climate discourse is about important but very generalized statistics, parts per million, overall warming trends. But of course, things look really different on the ground. I think that fundamentally leads to a lot of confusion that things are going to look different on different continents, on different coasts, in one community to another, where your family lives might be experiencing really different and seemingly contradictory environmental conditions than what you're experiencing. And so having some great fidelity with the local. I mean, we're literally like pulling out maps when we're editing these stories in many cases. And to just make sure that people have the geography right, or, again, that they're having local informants or talking with folks who have expertise in the areas they're writing about to make sure that there's a sort of. Like Vandana said, it doesn't have to be completely meticulous about not having any room for interpretation and license, but also making sure that the. That there's a sort of foundation of facticity and fidelity to people's experiences if they're on the ground in a community like that. So I think, you know, a lot of this is just Taking care. And like, I like Vandana's point about transparency, like being as open as possible about your thought process and not. And not pretending that you're coming from a valueless place. That's another thing. I mean, you know, we know that values drive people's acceptance or rejection of information about climate change, but also shape what people feel we ought to optimize for in designing climate action. Like, what kinds of future do we want to reach? And that's what the fiction can help us map out and have conversations about. But that means, you know, optimizing for particular values. I mean, we might be saying what we're optimizing for in many cases now is efficiency, convenience, profit for particular entrenched players. And fiction can help illuminate that. But then it's like kind of trying to parse what these visions of the future offer in terms of different values and different priorities, but not pretending that the writers don't have an investment is important too. That kind of false objectivity doesn't make for good literature and it doesn't make for trust with readers.

Either. I love how the theme of transparency and trust, and not only factual accuracy, but kind of greater truth is coming through here. Christopher, I want to give you an opportunity to jump in as.

Well. Yeah. I fundamentally think that we are not going to be able to understand our climate futures in the absence of storytelling. That is, I would in some sense like to almost invert the question. It's not so much that one supplements or complements the other. I think one enables the other. Right. That is, without story. Again, stories hold humanity together since the beginning of time. In some sense a throwaway comment, but it also just demonstrates how true it is. And so the idea that we can come to grips with what a 2 degree world is just to link back to this other iconic benchmark that we associate with international climate policy, which drives the soon to be 30 30th cop. Right. With all of the issues that we have touched on earlier, I mean, this is still the cadence, it's still how we think that we want to understand climate disruption. And so we can't fundamentally do that, though, without some form of storytelling. And I don't think we can get to good storytelling without some form of fictionalization. I mean, again, I view these things as inseparable. And perhaps to zoom out even further, we think about some of the issues and challenges with climate science communication, one that I would or one that I've kind of re experienced over and over again when I do outreach with a whole host of communities is the fact that we're starting in earnest this storytelling so late in the game. We ought to have been doing this 20 or 30 years ago. And I know it was happening, but it's reached, I would argue, a critical mass in terms of its ability to reach people and potentially influence people. To think about this from a slightly different perspective, that it's not some abstract consideration, but it's something that's real, it's something that's personal. So again, to me, it's impossible to disentangle these two.

Threads. Love that. I want to turn to some more questions that are coming from our audience and one fairly specific one from Susan. Curious if Manda Scott, with her writing on Thrutopia, is familiar to any of you. She and Rupert Reed's book Adaptive Transformation uniquely brings forward an approach to solutions in addition to mitigation. So is Amanda Scott familiar to anyone on our panel? And any comments? No, I'm seeing shaking.

Heads. I, you know, I've definitely heard of that. I think through Topia and Protopia are terms I've been hearing more over the past year or so. I think that there is a totally understandable surge in interest for utopian thinking, utopian literature. But I also think people realize that those kinds of of complete utopias, a perfect society, often masks a lot of abuse, exclusion, expropriation. I mean, that goes back to Thomas Moore's book Utopia and haunts that whole tradition. So it is cheering that people are trying to think through models for telling stories that are hopeful without being naive. And I mean, that's about my level of familiarity and understanding with that framework, which I'm sure has quite a lot more to it. But I think it's symptomatically kind of part of this like grasping for something that's like a utopia, but that feels like, you know, perhaps admits for greater diversity and social complexity than most traditional utopian writing.

Does. Yeah, and I would add that I'm intrigued and I will look it up. I wrote an essay a couple of years back called Utopias of the Third Kind because I'm very interested in the utopic imagination, especially if we think of utopia not as fixed, but more as a direction, a desire rather than a destination that kind of can orient us towards a different place than where we are heading. So yeah, I will definitely look this up. Thank.

You. Well, in the spirit of continuing to share ideas for where folks can go next, I was going to ask you and folks in the Q and A have asked for reading recommendations from each of you do you have a. I won't limit it to books, but a favorite book short story author in the climate fiction space that you would recommend folks go check.

Out. I have one fairly generic recommendation and then two kind of weird ones, if I can do that, but I'll do them fast. One is the obvious thing, and if you're reading climate fiction, you're already reading him. But someone we've worked with a lot too is Kim Stanley Robinson, and I think his work is often referred to and really kind of is actually also his recent Ministry for the Future is read quite a lot by transnational climate negotiators, people at the UN Climate Agency. And so he is, you know, forming a kind of intellectual point of reference with a lot of those novels. The two things I wanted to recommend Heather, I saw this question too, so I was thinking about it is one is a kind of weird fiction story by China Mieville called Polonia, which is in a collection called Three Moments of an Explosion, and it shows the protagonist coming out of their house in the United Kingdom and looking up in the sky, and there are icebergs floating in the sky above their house. And so this turns into this kind of very oblique climate parable. The other novel I wanted to mention was Pichaya Sudbhand's Bangkok Wakes to Rain, which walks through the sort of history, present and future of Bangkok through a kind of entangled cast of characters. And there's a whole kind of speculative fiction, lightly climate future element that gives you a really vivid, beautiful image of a future for Bangkok. And so I think that's also a beautiful novel because it shows continuities between the past, present and future, and really tracks the long shadow of, for instance, colonialism in a particular space. So those are my two slightly weirder wrecks after the sort of obvious.

One. And I will make a commitment that after this webinar we will pull together all of these reading and if we have a minute or two beyond reading recommendations to share with everyone here today. But Christopher, were you going to jump in with recommendations.

There? Yeah, sure. I will offer two. Also, I would very much recommend the Southern Reach series by Jeff Vandermeer. That's just amazing. It's not just climate fiction. It's very meta, but it's incredibly, incredibly captivating. And I am of the opinion that what we call climate engineering is going to have a moment that's a whole other conversation, if that's desirable, good or bad. That's not really what I'm getting at here. I'm simply having a more difficult time imagining the next 10, 20, 30 years where it's not pushed forward in some meaningful, meaningful way from a technological perspective. Which leads me to a book that I would recommend, which is called Termination Shock. That is a very interesting expose of what that feels like. That was written by Neal Stevenson and I would highly, highly.

Recommend both strong recommendations. Vandana, how about.

You? Well, I wish I'd thought about this before because I'm sure other names will come to mind when I do. But off the top of my head at this moment I'm thinking about one writer not yet as well known in the US as she should be. She's from India, her name is Remi B. Chatterjee and she's got a novella out that's really compelling about climate change and I'm completely not remembering the name. So I will find it and send it to you, Heather. But I also recently over the break read a book by Ray Naylor called the Mountain and the Sea, which is, well, it's in a climate changed world and it's about other species and communicating with other species. And it's a really brilliant novel I think, and a very brave novel like that takes risks and doesn't necessarily succeed fully but but really is worth reading because of its conceptual audacity. So right now those are the two things that come to mind. I know there are others, I just can't remember them right now.

Sorry. No, there are so many. I will add one more since Joey and Christopher already hit on a couple of my favorites, but I don't know if we get to call from the 90s. An oldie but goodie but Octavia Butler's parable of the Sower. Just a truly foresightful novel that really interweaves both climate change and social inequity and injustice issues that I love. I want to quickly, with the last few minutes we have here, we had a question about moving from maybe the more traditional media of stories or books to other media in the climate fiction space. And since we don't have time for an in depth discussion of the trends there, if folks have favorites that are non written media that you might jump into and Joey, I know this, this kind of cuts you short because your projects always deeply involve artists as well as visual artists as well as the written word. But I'll just say I think we are starting to see it moving into other media. And a lot of my thinking about the power of climate fiction in communicating climate science potentially was a series that came out a couple of years ago called Extrapolations, which I believe was an Apple TV series where each one is pegged to a specific year and temperature and weaves through a number of scenarios. But yeah, other games, stories.

Films. So we, we. I host a series called CSI Skill Tree about games and I have noticed through that quite, quite a lot of really interesting environmentally oriented narratives that's becoming a real area of interest for game developers. I think two that really come to mind are Cloud Gardens and a game called Mutazione, both of which look at kind of environmental despoilment and environmental remediation, but in a really complex and challenging way. I'm making them sound not fun. They're both fun. But yeah, I think that, you know, and there's increasingly, you know, climate themes are like, with literature kind of seeping into all kinds of visual media and I'm particularly mindful of it in games. But, you know, there's this book that Mark Bould wrote called the Anthropocene Unconscious that came out a couple years ago where he argued that climate anxiety kind of pervades contemporary culture and that like texts that aren't supposed to be about the environment or about climate are kind of quietly soto voce expressions of climate anxiety and our fears about, you know, the environmental systems that we rely on falling away. And, you know, so I've started because of that book to see seeds of this in all kinds of different cultural.

Productions. Vandana Christopher. A film, a game, other. Other media that. That comes to mind, If not. Oh, go ahead.

Vandana. I just want to mention that I'm generally illiterate in other media, but I do want to mention one communication style that people are experimenting with in marginalized communities that I know about in India, and that is using theater and storytelling together to tell the story of the climate. Also a kind of bringing together the local knowledge. And I totally agree with Joey that that foregrounding the local and then connecting it to the global is really important for justice and other reasons. So basically tying in local knowledge, local stories and the big story together through theater and song, you know, going from village to village among marginalized communities. And that's a totally different kind of medium that we've been talking about. But I thought I would put that in because it's really exciting. Thank you.

You great. Well, it is 2:32. We have blown through our allotted hour. It has been wonderful talking with all of you and thank you to those of you who joined us and for all of the incredible questions. We were not able to get through all of them. And there are many additional conversations worth of prompts there about other storytelling traditions and, and their value and many, many more threads that we could have pulled on. But we very much appreciate your attention and your questions. And thank you so much to Vandana Singh, to Joey Esrich, and to Christopher Schwalm, all of you, for joining us today. I hope you have a wonderful afternoon and we will follow up with everyone with all of those reading, watching and gaming recommendations. So, so thank you all so.